


you steal the air

by ilgaksu, ShatterinSeconds



Series: i don't say no /and you don't say no (the carmen sandiego au) [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Art School, Alternate Universe - Carmen Sandiego Fusion, Alternate Universe - Thieves, Art History, Art Theft, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-26 01:58:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19758265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShatterinSeconds/pseuds/ShatterinSeconds
Summary: “It’s just a painting,” Keith tries to lie out loud. Lance hears it, he can tell. He huffs under his breath.“Yeah, no,” is all he says in reply.





	you steal the air

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Bleachers' [Don't Take The Money](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UTznjanFpc). I wrote this fic; credit for co-creating ideas has to go to my partner in crime, [ShatterinSeconds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shatterinseconds/works). 

There are only two choices you can make: the right one, or the wrong one. Sometimes, the right one looks wrong and the wrong one looks right. It looks easier, better, it looks like everything you’ve ever wanted and just three steps away: but this is the thing. It’s still the wrong choice. 

These are the only two choices you can make. The right one. The wrong one. This is all there is. There are no other versions of this story. 

*

Keith next sees Lance in Munich. He’s stood in St. Peter’s Church, just off the Marienplatz. Keith can pick him out by the dull shine of his satin suit jacket, the run of the embroidery over his shoulders and down his back, flowers unfurling like the drag of a tongue. He’s staring at the body of Saint Munditia - which is at this point a bejewelled skeleton, gems a covering for her rotted teeth and false eyes stuck in her head. There’s gilt, too. 

“You wouldn’t,” Keith says, moving to stand next to him, casts all the judgement he can into his tone, even as he idly tots up the relative total value of the whole get-up. It’s....not a bad number. Lance startles at his voice, and badly: Keith raises his eyebrows and smirks. 

“Shit,” Lance hisses, gaining a healthy glare from a passing visitor. He rapidly lowers his voice to a whisper. “You scared me.” 

He doesn’t ask what Keith is doing here. At this point, it feels unnecessary. So was the comment. He knows Lance. He knows he doesn’t know jewels for shit. It may have been three months since Keith last saw him, but it’s not even been two years since - 

Fuck. It’s been nearly two years. 

It doesn’t matter. They’ve been doing this for a while, is all. Keith vaguely recognises the jacket, the raised feel of the embroidery stitches under his fingers definitely not just imagination. He can’t remember where. Barcelona? Valletta? He remembers the smell of sun on stone and the sound of an electric fan working overtime and very little else. The hotel room after that had been in Antigua, he knows, and there had been air-conditioning there. 

“How’s it going?” Lance asks, turning and heading out of the church. He isn’t playing to role at the moment, shoulders back, smiling. Keith has noticed when he’s working, he tends to hunch, folding inwards, making himself a bit smaller. “You missed me?” 

“Not at all,” Keith says, falling into step. 

“Aw, kitten. I missed you. It’s been too easy without you.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Keith grumbles, squinting in the sudden daylight as they head towards Marienplatz. “You sure look like it’s been rough on you.” 

Lance offers him a pair of sunglasses and Keith refuses. Lance shrugs and puts them on. There’s a Chanel logo on them, of course, glinting in the light like a separate golden eye. Keith thinks of sarcophagi in low light in London, and he doesn’t even pretend not to roll his own eyes. 

“What can I say? I like to work for my money.” 

Lance even pulls down the sunglasses a little, so he knows for sure Keith saw him wink. 

“You’re not getting to it,” Keith blurts out right about then, “Not this time,” even though he shouldn’t, even though he shouldn’t let himself get riled up - even though he shouldn’t have recognised Lance in profile ducking through the cathedral door and been drawn over like he was on godforsaken strings - 

_You’re not getting to it; you’re not getting to **me** ; _ at this point it’s the same thing, isn’t it? Keith is the work. All there is left is the work. 

“Okay,” Lance says, pretending to agree with him, and it just makes Keith angrier. 

“It’s like, eight feet tall this time, did they tell you that?” he spits. 

_Did you finally start reading the fucking briefs yourself,_ is what he’s really asking. Lance frowns. 

“What is it you think we’re talking about again?” is what he says, and he sounds so genuinely confused, eyes round and blinking, that Keith almost falls for it. He stands there, unsure what to say next, shifting from foot to foot. This is the part he’s always been bad at. This is the part they’d brought Lance on board for. 

“Huh,” Lance says, “That’s weird. Anyway -” and darts forward, so fast Keith is certain this it: this is the moment it’s going to happen, whatever is in Lance’s hand is a blade, or a taser, or - 

There’s a knife in his own pocket. There’s another in his boot. But he brings up his own arm instead. Lance freezes - _stupid_ \- Keith’s arm braced across his chest, holding him back - _stupid_ \- close enough to - 

_Stupid,_ Keith thinks miserably _._ If it was anyone else, he could be on the floor already. But it’s not. Lance stares at him. He reads Keith’s expression in a split second - and then backs up, almost tripping over himself, moving so rapidly he bumps into a passing tourist behind him. 

“Oh,” he says, in an apologetic Canadian accent - faking it, turning it on like a tap. He even sticks to English, even though Keith’s heard his German. It’s passable. “I’m so sorry, ma’am. Sorry!” 

He barely bothers turning his head to look at her, eyes still on Keith. The whole thing gives Keith time he could spend bolting, but he instead wastes on realising the thing in Lance’s hand is a business card. He has a six-second advantage before Lance is going to come at him, all eyes and after an explanation, so Keith buys himself some extra time: he grabs the business card, ripping it right out of Lance’s hand, turns on his heel, and makes it down into the subway and onto the next leaving train in record time, ruining at least ten tourist photographs en route. 

There’s no seats available. The doors close just as Lance hits the platform, after him, and the train melts into the tunnel before he can find Keith’s face through the window. Keith sags against the door, catching his breath. The business card is for a hotel in the middle of the Old Town. He takes a photo of it and texts it to Pidge, then turns it over. There’s a room number and a smiley face. It’s in Lance’s handwriting. And he’d not known anything about the height of the Franz Von Stuck painting, which can only mean it’s not what he’s here for. If he’s not here for _The Guardian of Paradise_ , then - 

Fuck, Keith thinks, sinking further against the door. He can hear it approaching the station. He’ll need to stand up again in the next thirty seconds or fall out and onto the platform, but - 

Fuck. Fuckfuck _fuck._

*

For the first eighteen years of Keith’s life, there was only the island. Well, really, it was for fifteen years: he had been three years old when the Guild had brought him there, it’s just that it was only stuff from those fifteen years on the island that had really stuck, and all the Guild’s teachers were notoriously tight-lipped on the subject of Keith, referred to by a real name and not by a codename. 

(“He’s a real boy,” he vaguely remembers someone saying when he was eight. They sounded very indignant in Keith’s memory, but eight-year-old Keith had pretended not to be listening to them, and instead focused on his morning training on the jungle gym. He was hanging upside down and everything, trying to ignore the rushing of the blood to his head so he could listen a little longer: acting busy, after all, was the best way to overhear secrets. 

“He’ll be one of us one day. Soon enough. It would be a smoother transition if he just -” 

“ _No_.”) 

The island, he later found out, was somewhere in the Caribbean: it was hard to pinpoint its exact location, Pidge informed him, because it was sort of in a legal grey area in terms of actually existing. It was artificial and had been originally built for an American millionaire in the 1960s, but the parts Keith remembered were the bars on the windows and the crunch of shells along the beachline, the sand itself bleach-white and littered with glittering sea-glass. How all it was, was in fact ordinary, worthless glass smoothed and buffed by the crushing pressure of water: it had withstood, it hadn’t broken, and thus it was beautiful. 

This was the metaphor the headmaster of the Guild’s academy used on Keith’s first official day there. He’d finally moved from being shoved into various spare rooms and into one of the student dormitories. He was sixteen, two years too young in comparison to the other recruits, but they’d made an exception. He was already causing too much trouble left to his own devices: better to occupy and channel all his energy into a beneficial direction for the Guild. 

_Don’t let us down,_ they told him. _You’re an experiment._ But Shiro had smiled at him afterwards, down from the dias, instantly breaking composure - right there, whilst still sat in the meeting. 

Keith was determined to be unforgettable. The codename he picked was Red. It wasn’t the best, but he wasn’t the best with words. He had other areas of expertise. 

*****

When Keith is twenty, someone steals a Gustave Moreau painting right out from under the noses of a Parisian art restoration company. Someone meaning not anyone the Guild knows about. Someone meaning nobody. It’s a hell of an audition. 

The company are in the clear, it turns out, nothing to gain and everything to lose. They’d been hired by the Hammer Museum to look over the painting before being exhibited specially to celebrate its anniversary - nearly a century and a half since its first debut right there in France. It had survived the delicate business of shipping, sent to its homeland all the way from its permanent residence in Los Angeles. It had arrived and been received into the care of the company, and then one night in August 2011, in the midst of a sweltering city summer it had just - 

Disappeared. 

But there’s no such thing as a true disappearing act. It’s deflection at best. A party trick. An optical illusion. They tell Keith to go, even though his French is shit, claiming no one else is available: privately, Keith thinks it’s a punishment for his fuck up in Cairo six months ago, hesitating at the crucial moment. One small pause, and he’s paying back the debt all this time down the line. 

He’s not bitter. Correction: he’s not bitter _yet_. No, correction: he’s not bitter _enough_ yet. He packs his bags and gets on a red-eye to Paris, stumbling down the elegant boulevards dishevelled and jetlagged, picking a Louisiana accent at random on arrival at the hotel reception. He lets it drizzle out of his mouth. It’s perfect. An American in Paris. Nobody remembers an American in Paris. 

At least it explains the shitty French, although British would have worked as well. Too many questions though - too much assumed familiarity with Europe. The thing he decided already on the flight, scrolling through the debrief in between a couple of superhero blockbusters and free wine - his passport says he’s twenty-one, he made sure of that, fuck you very much, he might as well get something from this - 

The thing he decided is that the thief is new, and on his home turf. There’s no point in pretending to know the country better than him in that case. This is his city, Keith can feel it. It’s because the Moreau painting looks like nothing in reproductions: dingy, low-lit, grimy with shadowy paint. Fucking Symbolists. But people flock to see it. That means it’s got to have something he’s missing, some rich, intangible quality in person. _Salome Dancing Before Herod (1876)._ He can sense it, the hooks of it reaching out through the screen, even if he has to squint. The figure of a beautiful woman, illuminated so brightly that everyone else in the picture pales to ghosts. He dismisses religious motive - too niche, and Salome’s a figure of temptation, sure, but you don’t walk off with a painting like this unless you’re motivated by - 

Money? Desperation? Either way, It’s an idealist’s kind of art. Keith pulls a cheap beanie down to just above his eyes, perfects a kind of awkward slouch, smears some sculptor’s clay onto a pair of jeans, grinding it into the denim until it sticks and stains. 

Then, he starts walking around the art school campuses. 

*

Two days after the horrorshow of sheer fucking embarrassment that is Marienplatz, Keith finds Lance in the Alte Pinakothek, sat on a bench right in front of Rubens’ _Honeysuckle Bower_ , staring up at it like a boy at church. Hands folded in his lap and all. If it wasn’t for the security guard uniform, heavy-duty flashlight and everything - the zipcord and harness hanging loose and empty at his feet - he might be at his First Communion.

“You know,” Lance says to Keith, without tearing his eyes from the painting, “They’d just gotten married when he painted this. It was his way of showing her to everyone he knew. Look at her. Look at her skin. She’s fucking glowing, Keith.” 

“It’s something,” Keith agrees, his throat closing up. Lance still hasn’t looked at him, even though Keith is here, like he always is, ready to stop him. What’s the point in sabotage if Lance isn’t even going to look at him? What’s the point of winning if Lance isn’t going to make the winning fun? 

_I like to work for my money._

The security guard’s hat is on the seat beside him. He keeps turning the flashlight over and over in his hands, as though testing the weight of it. 

“That’s why there’s the honeysuckle all up there,” Lance adds, relentless. “It’s, you know, it’s symbolic. It means devotion. I was going to try and kiss you. The other day. In case you were -” 

“I wasn’t wondering,” Keith snaps, on edge, he’s listened to Lance wax poetic about every other piece of paint and colour that’s passed through his hands but this one feels bad somehow. It feels hollow. “I actually figured that out somewhere along the way.”

“Was that before the train left the station?” 

It feels like they’re talking about something else, something bigger. 

“No,” Keith replies. His voice sounds hoarse. He swallows. “No, it wasn’t.” 

When he sits down next to Lance, Lance looks at him briefly, and looks away slow, like he’s unsticking his gaze. 

“It’s just a painting,” Keith tries to lie out loud. Lance hears it, he can tell. He huffs under his breath. 

“Yeah, no,” is all he says in reply. 

There’s a silence. It feels horrible and very absolute. 

“Did it work?” Keith asks. “The honeysuckle? Did painting it work?”

“Well, they were together for the rest of her life,” Lance tells him, “So -” 

He shrugs.

“I’m sorry I was scared of you,” Keith says. He doesn’t take Lance’s hand, but he takes the flashlight and tugs it until Lance lets go. Then he puts it on the floor. 

“Did you used to be?” Lance asks, turning to face him. Keith drops his eyes and hooks two of his fingers into the belt loop of the stolen security guard uniform. He pulls again, pulls on the fabric and on Lance, testing the strength of both, and watches as there’s no give, the fabric industrial-grade. The loop cuts into his fingers and cuts off the blood to them, turning the skin around the fabric white. 

“No,” Keith confesses. He lets go, curls his fingers, pulls again. 

“Stop yanking at me,” Lance mutters, and tips Keith’s face up towards him. 

They fuck on the bench, Lance’s hands white-knuckled in Keith’s hair, stolen uniform pulled just enough out of the way that touching him feels like another kind of theft; all his skin piecemeal and his head hanging over the edge of the seat, his eyes open and facing the Rubens, the glow of long-dead lovers reaching out through the oils. 

Afterwards, he sits up, cleans up, buttons up. Picks up the flashlight, and the harness and the zipcord. 

“What are you -”

Lance leans forward, and this time Keith, gone sex-stupid and soft, doesn’t flinch. Lance kisses his forehead. 

“It’s just a painting, right?” he echoes. His eyes are a little too bright, but that could be from the lights, Keith tries to convince himself. It could be from orgasm. It could be from anything. “See you around, Keith.” 

He leaves. Keith lets him go. The museum write him a formal thank you, on perfect, creamy paper, the kind that has weight to it, that has no give. 

They don’t see each other again until Dublin. 

*

There are only two choices you can make, even when it’s all thrown upside down. The wrong choices are Paris and Antigua and somewhere between Barcelona and Valletta but not either of them. Keith makes wrong choices in New York and Edinburgh and twice in Tokyo. Lance leaves him a Uniqlo shirt with a Hokusai print on it afterwards. He thinks he’s being funny. There are only two choices you can make, even when the right one feels like Munich and is the reason Keith has started hating Rubens, because when there are only two choices that’s all there can be. That’s all there ever is. There are no other versions of this story. 

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes: 
> 
> The paintings that are being referred to are all real and, apart from Salome Dancing before Herod, are actually in the places stated at the time stated (Salome was actually part of a major exhibition in L.A. in 2012, so...probably wasn't in France in 2011, but who knows?)
> 
> In order, we have: 
> 
> St Peter's Church's resident martyr, [Saint Munditia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munditia). Be aware - this link has an image, and she is a skeletal corpse. Imagine how freaked out I was when I stumbled on her by accident when I lived in Germany. (Note that it's apparently called Old Peter by locals, but I chose to omit that and have Keith use the actual name since he's not a local resident.) 
> 
> Franz Von Stuck's [Guardian of Paradise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian_of_Paradise#/media/File:Franz_Von_Stuck_-_The_Guardian_of_Paradise.jpg), the 8ft tall painting Keith mistakes Lance as planning to steal. 
> 
> Gustave Moreau's [Salome Dancing before Herod](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Salome_Dancing_before_Herod_by_Gustave_Moreau.jpg), the painting stolen in Paris in 2011. 
> 
> Peter Paul Rubens' self-portrait (with his wife Isabella Brant) [Honeysuckle Bower](https://www.wga.hu/art/r/rubens/41portra/08artist.jpg). Everything Lance says about it in terms of intepretation and biographical detail is true. 


End file.
